


This Path

by cherrysprite



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Good Theo Raeken, Hell, M/M, Out of Body Experiences, Pre-Hell Theo Raeken, Theo Raeken-centric, the fourth wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 12:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21373831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrysprite/pseuds/cherrysprite
Summary: Theo is given the choice to avoid going to Hell by some mysterious savior, but when she shows him his life if he goes through with his punishment, Theo isn't quite so sure anymore.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Comments: 9
Kudos: 136





	This Path

**Author's Note:**

> Before this begins, since I'm not entirely sure if it makes sense to people other than myself (lol) I just want to say: Keep in mind that Theo is spectating his life! When I describe Theo's actions, such as leaning against his truck, it's not "Real" Theo, it's the concept of who he could be.
> 
> Carry on!!

Right as the tip of Kira's sword touched the concrete ground, everything around Theo froze.

Kira's hair, that had slightly fallen into her face, paused over the bridge of her nose, and Scott still looked at him with grim determination in his eyes. But neither of them moved. Neither did any of the others, Mason with his eyes shut tightly to the sight of him, Malia with malice remembering all he did to hurt her and the rest of her friends, Lydia poised to hold Liam back. Liam looking both scared and resigned for what reason Theo couldn't begin to wonder.

And while it looked like all of them either wanted to come towards him or run far away, back to safe homes where he didn't exist to them anymore, the scene was frozen. Theo could flex his fingers, take a hesitant step forward. If he weren't as confused as he didn't want to admit, he could have walked over and looked into each of their eyes, calculating the anger and fear they had in them. Brown would hold decisiveness and anger. Blue held resentment.

The only thing he had time to do was recognize the eerie feeling in his stomach and surrounding his head like a cloud, knowing something bad was supposed to happen, but he didn't get to do much else. The thirty or so seconds of silence were interrupted by a voice behind him.

"Theo," She said coolly and calmly, and Theo turned around slowly to look at her. She stood perfectly still, smooth movements when needed as she looked him up and down, but he couldn't picture her even though she was right in front of him. All he could tell was that she was there. Something about her made him weary to reach out and touch her. His fingers twitched at his sides. "Quite a situation you've gotten yourself into, hm?"

"What-?" Theo bit out, turning as she walked to look at her, or at least what he could see. His brain was too foggy to question.

"They were going to send you where you belong," The figure said, and Theo felt something that could only be described as vaporous run itself over his shoulder. He must have looked confused, because Theo could imagine her smile. "Right down to Hell. Down with your dear old sister."

The mention of Tara set Theo on edge, and he grit his teeth. "So why haven't they?" Theo shot, whirling around to try and see her and finding nothing in return. The cold, barely-there feeling was back on his shoulder, running down his spine like the hand of someone he should have been able to trust. If he saw her, she would have been grinning again. Smug, just to tense him more.

"See, Theo, I don't want to hurt you," she explained slowly in her rich voice, but Theo couldn't let go of the tension in his balled fists. "And what they want to do to you would. It would hurt you more than anything you've known before, Theo. But you have choices."

Some part of him wanted to push himself away, break into a run, but deep down he knew he could never evade her. Whatever she was, she was already weaving herself into the thread of his shirt and digging in underneath his skin like smoke. "I'm giving you the chance to make one. You can walk out of here a free man. Run far away from here, never return to this town you've wrecked. You could find a different pack, and leave all of these people behind." Theo was losing his breath, but not from thinking of it. In reality, the concept was pleasant. He would never have to think about any of the people frozen around him again if he tried, start anew now that he was completely on his own. It would be a clean slate for him, and maybe that was the way to go. Theo was already wondering what kind of truck he would buy when he got out of the sewers when he remembered there was another option.

"And the other choice?" He asked, keeping all emotion out of his voice. "It sends me to hell."

She smiled again, and Theo suddenly realized how faint he felt. "Yes," She said innocently, both of her weightless hands on his shoulders now, standing behind him. The room around him began to fade.

He stood then in the middle of a hospital hallway, characterized by the clinical, bright whites of the walls and floor tinted green by darkness. The only light came from broken ceiling lights that flickered in and out before he was transported without moving to another room, the morgue. All he could do was watch in silence, eyebrows furrowed suspiciously. "If you choose this path," came the whispered voice again, "you'll see your sister again."

There was another version of him crawling out of the metal drawer, looking terrified and wide-eyed as soon as he forced the door open. From the looks of it, he had as little idea of what he was doing there as present-Theo did, looking around the room wildly and anxiously.

Theo hadn't seen Tara since she was fourteen, and even then, she hadn't looked that bad. She had been half-drowned, freezing water tinting her skin blue and weighing down her hair, but it didn't compare to then. Now, as she stalked towards dream Theo with a deadened, blank expression, Theo noticed that her chest was torn open, heart ripped out and ribs cracked and broken brutally. The Dread Doctors must have taken her heart out while she was still alive and struggling, which Theo realized with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He was helpless as Tara reached him and plunged her long, thin fingers through his T-shirt and into his chest to pull his heart back out, and could only watch himself in shock as he dropped to the ground. "She does this every night," the voice said, reminding Theo she was still there. "Sometimes, you even try to run." They switched to a scene of him pinned against the wall before he died again. "And sometimes you just let it happen."

It was chilling, even to a young man desensitized to blood. He felt each and every hit of pain even if it wasn't him yet, the figment of the vision powerful enough. "This hurts now, but imagine how long four years feels down here? Lonely, isn't it?"

"Four years?" Theo croaked, unable to catch his breath as he cleared his throat.

"Well, four months, but time just goes by so slow," the Voice said with a hint of laughter in her voice.

As Theo watched himself be killed again, the sound of his ribs breaking and skin tearing filling his ears far too loudly to be natural, he was ready to turn back. He wanted the other option. What happened then? "No," Theo found himself breathing, but it didn't stop. Instead, Tara ripped his heart out again right in front of him, almost showing it to him as she raised it above her head to examine it under the light, and it felt like he'd been kicked in the stomach.

"It's such a deep feeling. It's like a stomach cramp in your lungs that never goes away, like your head's been held under thick water until you have to breathe it in." Theo's throat constricted as he suddenly felt something coming up, coughing roughly until blood fell into the palm of his hand. He gasped out for air, but only got the overwhelming scent and taste of his own blood in the back of his throat. "Not to mention the guilt. Eventually, when you get used to the physical, you'll be able to remember what you did to her and the rest of your family when you killed her. You can imagine how scared she was and how sad your parents were when neither of their children turned up the next morning, or the one after that, and when they had to move away without you. They never knew their son was a killer." As she spoke those words, Theo's vision started to go out again and his chest felt too tight for his lungs. Nonexistent heart beating too fast on the floor where he should be. Guilt wasn't something he had felt in years, not since he did something minor like break a plate, and he hadn't missed it. "Here, you would learn that you were a bad person. That you deserved the torture you got for all the pain you caused the people around you. And you would learn to live as someone who could not be considered fearless and invincible."

As things went black again, all he could tell was that he couldn't go through with it. If there was a choice that didn't involve Hell, he'd take it. "T-take me back," Theo began to beg, looking around in the dark as his head began to pound.

"I'm sorry," She said sympathetically, tone fake, but the tightness in his chest started to let up along with the blindness. "I want you to see this."

When he could see again, he saw two people he wouldn't have expected. With all of what was happening, he had temporarily forgotten that Liam Dunbar existed, let alone Hayden, whose last name he never bothered to learn. The sword, the same one that still wasn't in the ground in real time, was now splitting a large crack into the same place Theo was standing just before the Voice found him."You do get out eventually," she offered. "It may have been a mistake, and no one wanted to, but Liam got you back. They needed you to channel Josh Diaz's electricity powers, but found you useless because you didn't have them." Theo looked at his hands as his counterpart did, right before looking up to see Liam being rammed into the wall. He saw himself holding an arm against the beta werewolf's throat and wondered how Liam hadn't pushed him off yet. He's perfectly capable even now, and just as willing. Still, he remained patient.

He saw himself in a few different places after that; the sewers again, being electrocuted, Scott's house with Malia punching him over and over again in the face, and in the sheriff's station behind bars as Mason, Hayden, and Liam look at him disdainfully. "It isn't good when you get back to the surface, of course. They don't know what happened to you down below, and as far as they're concerned, they don't care."

"They hate me," Theo observed as he watched Liam sneer at him when he said something he didn't quite catch, and noticed the way Hayden's hands twitched to hit him through the bars. "Even more than they already did."

"Because you're of no use to them now," Voice said, and if Theo could see her, she'd be nodding her head. Theo was about to look away, signal that she could show him something else, when a slight noise of protest coming from Hayden made him focus again.

The pieces of the sword clattered down to the ground of the prison, and both Theos looked at Liam with wide, surprised eyes. "He just-"

"Got rid of the way to send you back?" Theo's lips parted and something shifted inside. It was like something snapped into place. "Congratulations, Theo. This is the first person to trust you now, even a little bit."

__

Theo watched as he woke up in the backseat of his car, hyperventilating and clutching at the thin hoodie over his chest. Beads of cold sweat sat at his hairline, his hair itself soaked by the time he woke up, as he tried to catch his breath. He had to watch through the rearview mirror into the backseat, there being no more room in the back for even an invisible entity, but it was terrifying all the same.

He'd never been like that, or at least known it. When he was with the Dread Doctors or the other chimeras, or even all alone, he knew he was cool and collected. He didn't think about what he'd done before and sure as Hell didn't feel guilty about it. He certainly didn't wake up with nightmares that spiraled into panic attacks, the chest pains back and making him want to tear his own heart out to give back if it meant it would stop beating so fast.

It was then that he realized how much he would really change if he went down this path, and he didn't know if he liked it. Sure, he wanted to get better now that he was beginning to see how bad the things he had done were, but it seemed like a lot of pain.

The next vision was quick after that, back in the police station when ghostriders, whatever those were, burst through the doors and took Hayden with their whips. That was when Liam unlocked the door to get him out, pulling him along as they went to the hospital. "You may have been the only one left to fight with, but he still didn't leave you behind," the Voice reminded as though he wasn't watching it play out in front of him, and Theo just nodded as he watched the two of them run out of the wrecked station.

He'd been paying close attention to what Liam said to him since he had showed up, but he hung on particularly strongly to what he said to him when he was standing in the morgue, facing away. "I'm not gonna help you. I'm not gonna save you. I'm gonna do exactly what you'd do to me." Theo swallowed. "I'm gonna use you as bait."

And Theo, oh, Theo, he was never a saving type, but he couldn't let Liam get taken. As he watched himself push Liam backwards into the elevator, he told himself in disbelief that he had only done it because Liam was stronger than him and he would be done for if he died first, but the look he saw in his own eyes did nothing to validate that thought.

"He lied, you know," the Voice said softly. "He would save you."

He did, and Theo watched him every time. He watched Liam pull him out of the line of fire and steal a ghostrider's gun to shoot the one that was trying to kill him, to which both Theos could only look at him with shock in response. Liam wasn't supposed to be his savior, after all, but then again, neither was Theo for him. "Why would he do that?" Theo asked only himself, just thinking it, but the Voice seemed to understand anyway.

"You'll see."

He was whisked away again.

__

The pack didn't like him. That was clear to see, and it wasn't going to be any different. One thing stayed constant in the pack, and everyone's ignoring or resentful nature towards him was it.

Hayden left Beacon Hills. Stiles went back to school. Scott was getting ready to leave. And Theo, from what he could tell, was confused as to what to do next. He grew his hair out and got a job as a cashier at a convenience store far enough towards the edge of town that he wouldn't see anyone he knew regularly, and he kept a low profile.

The nightmares didn't stop coming, and it made Theo feel conflicted. He wanted to feel bad for himself and convince himself that he didn't deserve to have those terrors, but deep down, he couldn't. His sadistic nature was always twisted, but it was even weirder now: he got a strange pleasure from watching himself wake up in pain, but knew that it wouldn't be the same if and when he was actually back in his living body.

But things were normal for awhile, and he was beginning to wonder why the Voice had shown him this when the scene switched again. "You remember Liam, don't you?" She asked him, as if he could have forgotten what with all she was telling him about him. "Well, there are a lot of important parts of this story, but I think you should focus on him."

"Him?" Theo asked, raising an eyebrow. Maybe Liam had come up before in the narrative he was spectating, but he never thought of the beta as someone particularly important before. He had been one of the most insignificant parts of his plans to take over the McCall pack, so he had figured that life would have played out the same way. He would have done his job - showing Theo he could somehow be trusted just a little - and then disappear from the picture for the most part. "Why Liam?"

"You'll see," the Voice said once again, switching the scene to a rocky place. He vaguely recognized it; he'd hung out around there before when he was tired of the same old. The abandoned zoo on the outskirts of Beacon Hills, up where car tires struggled to reach level ground.

He saw himself there with Liam, watching behind him, and looked at himself skeptically. He looked thoughtful in the moment, calculating, but even Theo could tell that it wasn't something bad.

Then he started yelling and Liam turned to him with a confused but angry puppy look on his face, and he was about to change his mind before he realized what was happening. He was trying to draw someone, the hunters, as the voice explained, out so that they could do something else besides play the waiting game. He had always known how to manipulate Liam's anger, but that was the first time he did it for a reason other than to just entertain him or cause harm.

It was a weird thing to watch, to say the least. He normally worked alone, and if there were other people around him, they weren't large parts of the plan. During this one, Liam was actually in center stage for the majority of it, and Theo wondered how he was tolerating it as he watched himself stand towards the back. Did he really trust the beta that much to make decisions for them?

Evidently not, because when the scene switched again, Liam was holding a small guy against a rock, growling into his face, and Theo punched him in the back of the head. "You saved that boy," the Voice said after being quiet for awhile, having let him watch on his own. "You may not have known it, but Nolan would have died there. He wouldn't have lived another seventy years. And Liam would have carried that grief with him for the rest of his life."

Theo didn't know why that affected him so much, but it did. It wasn't like he had regretted his actions before he'd seen all of this, so why did he care about Liam's feelings all of the sudden?

He carried Liam back to his truck once the sun went down, knocking him back to sleep when he started to stir and make a fuss, since something was clearly wrong with him. Theo was patient, which was surprising, and gently set him in the front seat instead of the back. He even wiped Liam's hands of his own blood so he wouldn't wake up and be scared, which he whispered to himself as he did it. In his floating state, Theo could only watch himself in awe.

But the worst part of that scene, the one that made him think the most, was seeing himself smile as Liam talked to him in the car.

He had never seen that before.

"You're his anchor," the whisper came, and Theo swallowed. "Neither of you knew it then, but you are."

"I can't be somebody's anchor," Theo protested quietly, looking down at his hands.

"But you are," She coaxed. "And just a week later, you saved his life. Again."

It was like Theo was a fly on the wall as someone else was walking, because that couldn't have been him. He was older, stronger, more meek. He carried himself differently, having gained enough knowledge to do it. He barely recognized himself as he stood in the elevator, only about a foot away from Liam, as he glanced down at Liam's lips. Theo felt like all of the air had been knocked out of his lungs when Liam looked away, and wondered if he felt the same in real life.

He was almost afraid to ask. "A-am I-?"

"Yes," she said, sounding almost delighted in how soft it was. "You realize it around now when this happens, too. You're catching on quickly."

But Theo couldn't be happy. He knew what he had done, and it was all starting to weigh on him. He knew that if he lived out his life this way, he would carry that same weight all day, every day, even if it wasn't all dropped on him at once. Eventually, he would collapse, and somehow falling in love wouldn't help.

As far as he was concerned, the Voice was lying, because he had never felt anything like this before. Never before had he felt the ache in his chest to touch, to caress, to kiss, and he was convinced that it was all just a figment of his imagination. If he was capable of feeling love, why hadn't he felt it for any of his childhood crushes? Why not for Tracy, who he had kissed? Why would it be for Liam, someone who could never love him back?

He had never felt love before, but as his heart pounded in his chest and made him feel like throwing up, he knew that he shouldn't go through with it. It was overcomplicated, and even if he'd never experienced it before, he knew how much it would hurt if Liam couldn't feel the same way for him.

She must have noticed him starting to spiral, because suddenly, they were gone, watching himself and Liam outside his truck in the parking lot. The door had caught a bullet in it from one going through the glass of a hospital window, but neither Theo could bring himself to care about it. Instead, he just leaned against it to cover it, and Liam looked at him, concerned. It was unfamiliar and made the feeling in the pit of his stomach more intense.

"I'll see you again, won't I?" Liam asked him seriously, and the little smug smile that had been on Theo's face before fell. It looked like he was thinking about it, weighing his options, and Liam took notice. "Hey, do you have anywhere to stay tonight?"

"Yeah, of course," He said, patting the hood of his truck, probably before realizing what message that sent. The smile dropped entirely as Liam raised his eyebrows and frowned.

"You're living in your truck?" Liam asked in a whisper, and Theo bit his mouth before nodding.

The next thing Theo knew, Liam was tucking him into bed. Literally. The guy who Theo had watch punch him repeatedly had tucked him into bed, left a nightlight - a nightlight, for God's sake - plugged into the wall outlet, and shut the door behind him. Present Theo looked aghast, confused and in disbelief. This couldn't be real. He was too invested now.

He was waking up the next morning to the smell of breakfast coming from the kitchen, and he walked downstairs while rubbing sleep out of eyes to find Liam standing at the stove. The way Liam turned his head to look at him and smiled a little made Theo go still for a second before melting back in. "Goodmorning," Liam said as though everything was normal, like Theo woke up in his house all the time.

And Theo's reaction was the worst part - he had to watch himself, stunned, as he walked forward and smiled right back.

"You have gotta be kidding me."

"That's not all, honey," the Voice said smoothly, and with a flick of invisible fingers, Theo was faced with something else. Liam crying.

He'd never seen that before.

"It may seem crazy to you now, but over the months you'd get to know Liam after hell...you want to protect him more than ever, and you both know why."

Theo knelt down to meet Liam's height as he sat on the floor, looking at him with care, and his breath caught in his throat when Liam tangled his fingers in Theo's hair.

Theo had never known what butterflies felt like before, and just assumed them to be a myth teenagers liked to exaggerate with, but as he saw Liam kissing him and felt the phantom pressure on his own lips, he understood. He ran his fingers over them, feeling them tingle as Liam moved, and couldn't breathe once again. "If you choose this path," she said, "you get him."

But it couldn't work, surely. They were like gasoline and a lit match, bound to ignite, but at what cost? The explosion and destruction in their path would be too much, and they'd both end up spent and gone at the end of it all.

"If you choose this path," she said again as the scenes switched too quickly for Theo to comprehend it. There were the two of them laying in bed, Liam dragging his fingers along Theo's bare chest gingerly with a smile, Liam holding his hand, resting his head on his shoulder as they watched a movie, going on a double date with Corey and Mason, since they were apparently friends in that life. There were tears and Liam waking him up only to cradle his head to his chest after a night terror, a comfort that Theo never thought of as looking so desirable, the more intense pictures of mouths open in ecstasy Theo had never felt before, intertwined fingers while the pack sneered at their relationship. Kisses pressed to lips to shut each other up, salted by tears, flavored with wolfsbane-laced alcohol.

And there was Theo down on one knee and Theo could do nothing more than choke on his own air as he watched it play out. He didn't have time to think about it before they were standing under an arch with flowers, slipping rings onto each others fingers with their friends all around them, and kissing each other to seal a bond that Theo had once considered useless. Now, his chest ached and he needed. He needed.

"If you choose this path," the Voice whispered as it switched one last time. Theo felt tears in his eyes, lips parted.  
In front of him was him and Liam standing in a small kitchen somewhere in Beacon Hills, and he was holding a baby. He was only a year old at most, a tiny, chubby hand held between two of Theo's fingers as he bounced him up and down to make him laugh. Liam grinned at the two of them so widely that his still-young eyes crinkled at the corners, and leaned in to give Theo a chaste kiss. "...you can live happily."

Theo didn't need to ask any questions, because he somehow knew. That baby boy was born via surrogate in early January, and they named him Henry after Liam's grandfather. They had gotten married only a year before in front of the lake, and he remembered exactly what Mason had said in his best man's speech, something undeniably embarrassing and funny. He knew that neither of them forgot their wedding anniversary, let alone the night they got together for the first time.

It was like everything fell into place for him.

"You'll go through the torture," She reminded. "But this is your second chance at life, Theo Raeken."

Theo stayed silent, eyes fixed on Liam and Henry, on the silver band on his ring finger.

"Would you like to see the other path?"

He watched as Liam's blue eyes met his, and his decision was made.

"No."

**Author's Note:**

> AAAAh I hope that made sense! Thank you so much for reading! I decided to try and do something different after I got an idea yesterday night...it was an entirely different plot but around the same thing, but that may just be a fic for another time.
> 
> Also, I know I've been lacking with posting lately. Believe me, 5k a month is not at all a goal, but I've just been really busy with my school's production and have had rehearsal until 5pm, so I'm usually tired and want to chill out by the time I'm home. Also, tech week is next week, so I'll DEFINITELY be tired then, lol. Thanks for being patient with me <3.
> 
> Feedback and comments are always appreciated!!


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